My wife has just shared with me this picture of Musine Kokalari.
She’s on the left, wearing a hat. We haven’t yet ascertained where or when it was taken, but obviously it was before her trial & before the death of her brothers.
What I like about it is how much it contrasts with how her life developed. It’s an easy trap to fall into, painting a person’s early life with the colours of its later years.
We do this with the dead, people whose ends we already know, not only with murder victims, those killed in accidents, even in cases of personal bereavement.
Attributing a kind of inevitability to someone who, for most of their existence, had as-yet unlived future that could easily have turned out differently.
What I like about this is it shows Musine not as a sacrificial victim of an oppressive & fascistic communist state. It shows her at a cafe, wearing the fashionable clothes of the time, with friends, enjoying herself. The hat is particularly jaunty.
She’s an intellectual, a liberal, a person of achievement with literary ambitions, a modern international woman - unconfined by the narrow traditions of nationality or caste. At this moment she has a future life filled with possibilities.
That it all turned out the way it did wasn’t written in some great celestial book of prophesy; it was a particular set of circumstances that occurred at particular times that led to a certain destination. At any moment, a step could have been taken in a different direction & things might have turned out very differently. When writing her story it’s important to keep that in mind.
And this, I think, applies to us all. It wasn’t that she made wrong decisions, hers were honourable choices given a set of circumstances not of her choosing - she knew the possible consequences yet still, bravely, did what she thought was the right thing - but at the moment this photo was taken those choices hadn’t yet been made.
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